Tim Kim

SavedByGrace. GM@180 $70m ARR. CoFounder@MiraeOpus. At most 60yrs left on this Earth, so just going for it. Exploring the X of Faith. Biz. Culture.

[Tim Kim @TimKimHQ]

7/8/26 Wednesday Swing Thoughts:

-glove is not optional, so much grip and no fear of losing the club when sweaty. lost glove, then bought glove midway and what a joy, felt like I could hurl the club while keeping my grip gentle

-so at setup keeping left arm straight and in tension seems to help me, will check with coach

-also on backswing letting myself feel just my left arm and then not hinging u til further back really gives a sense of connection and feels like i can just ride that track back on that downswing

-will ask how much to allow left forearm to pronate, for sure right arm supine is wonderful

-i definitely like to exhale during set up bc then i have an inhale to make final adjustments, and then exhale through the swing

-will double check grip and how many knuckles down

-but overall, felt like
today understand and adjusted left arm positioning as straight line and delayed hinge, and man 9 iron is dropping like 160 and impact is darn satisfying and it feels repeatable. will take the win! it feels like a miracle. so thankful for my coach.

[Tim Kim @TimKimHQ]

https://t.co/cPW7MzP7Nj

[Tim Kim @TimKimHQ]

It's so dumb when there is a product that says it has automated finance. I pretty much fall asleep while simultaneously experiencing some deep anguish. What is finance? Come to me with the framework. For example, finance is composed of 70 main verbs that can be grouped into three major areas. Of these 70 typical verbs, we've automated 40. That is a lot more coherent, concrete, specific, and real.

[Tim Kim @TimKimHQ]

Honest question: who's wealthier?

- The man who has a million dollars and his children call him once a year.

- The man who has not yet retired, has no sizable retirement, and his three kids call him every three days. Each of them calls him on a different day. Every morning, one of his children calls him and asks him, "Good morning," and they chat about their days and how they're doing.

Put another way: do we hold within our hands the ability to make our parents rich with simply a decision?

"He who honors his mother and father will live a long life." That's the verse I don't understand. There is a mystery there, though. It calls to me.

[Tim Kim @TimKimHQ]

I'm playing with the idea of creating a company culture where athletic wear is accepted. The thought is: it's amazing to, every hour, get up from your desk and run a half mile around the complex and return. There is so much ought to and should in this life, inherited customs and practices. When I think about the 40-50 hours we spend at our desks every single week, I just genuinely think there's a better way to build a corporate white-collar environment. There is a way to be more physically healthy and refreshed and genuinely drive more profits by playing with the cultural norms. Imagine ASICs and Nikes and shorts and performance tees. Juxtaposed with customer service tickets and critical path tables for projects.

[Tim Kim @TimKimHQ]

For the last nine years, Ben Horowitz's piercing sentences in his famous essay on Being a CEO has always been in my ear every single day. "It's all about managing your emotions. Your psychology. That's the one skill." Those sentences allowed me to make sense of all the stress and struggle and to accept that the suffering is inevitable, and it's precisely the skill that is meant to be developed. If one is stressed, things are exactly as they should be. You are learning how to handle that stress. And how to accept life as it is which is important.

I think the other sentence in this new season of 2026 that comes to my mind is how "the journey is the prize." My dear friend H shared this motto on a beautiful hiking trip in the fall of 2025. I find it coming to my mind more and more this summer. Not only must we manage our psychology and be resilient, but it goes even further than that. We must enjoy it. We must remember that we are laboring out of love, and this life is so short. We have to love the journey. The journey itself is the prize.

[Tim Kim @TimKimHQ]

Reminder to self: life is more fun if, instead of checking the feed every time I want some stimulation, I write something and create something and put it out there. That's the joy of X: it facilitates and celebrates and allows many bursts of creativity all day long. I wish I had come up with the original idea for Twitter. I'm a fan because I'm a fan of humans in general creating.

[Arvind Jain @jainarvind]

The approach here is exactly right. Pairing builders with domain experts, and grounding the work in the company’s real knowledge, systems, and workflow context.

Most AI initiatives don't stall for a lack of ambition or model capability, but because the people building the tools or workflows are too far removed from the friction of the actual work.

The breakthrough happens when you combine technical builders, domain experts, and the scattered knowledge, workarounds, context behind the workflow itself.

You can’t redesign the future if you’re too far removed from the friction of the present.

[Tim Kim @TimKimHQ]

Golf Notes 7/6 Monday:

-Yes definitely keep right forearm supinated at setup, bc automatically on downswing that right arm feels like it's locked into the appropriate slot with the appropriate mechanic locked in.

-Yes the mental image for me when it comes to hands and the release is truly an axe and releasing a chop in a 2 handed motion at the ball, more so than a singular left hand controlled motion?

-My concept of setup with respect to upper body is slightly different now as I realize you don't necessarily want to be perfectly straight and perpendicular to the ball, for me it works to "take an angle" to the ball primarily based around what angle chopping at the ball feels natural. then there is no more sense of having to control face or arm variables and it feels "set and locked in". I do have questions here. Will experiment and ask coach. Is it okay for my shoulders to not be square and allow the angle to the ball that more closely mimics position at impact?

-Lastly, I got rid of the idea that lifting up with my left leg on the initial leg driven descent is fatal and creates topping. My coach says I was taught wrong and to abandon that notion because correct mechanics require the left leg to straighten through descent, and the moving arc of the upper body and arms is sufficient to hit into the ball and divot event as the left legs straightens.

Crazy how learning is as much about disconnecting as it's about connecting. Bad connections can filter the world incorrectly and leave you totally hosed bc the data feedback is now skewed.

[Tim Kim @TimKimHQ]

4/4/26 Saturday, Golf Discoveries/Notes

-let unhinge at impact feel natural and complete, just throw it down with natural momentum.

-if you let the right forearm supinate at the start position, backswing and downswing feel simpler and tucked into body

-checking my grip, at least two knuckles down. will ask coach if it's all knuckles

Joy today! About 35 out of 45 balls in I decided to play with supinating my right forearm at start. Before I thought it was my whole setup that I should supinate because I was getting some results. But that didn't quite work. Today I realized leaving the setup natural but allowing right arm to supinate at set up is working for me right now. Joy!

And applied coach's lesson. Let legs clear and hips. Don't worry about timing and face. The set up creates the constraints so trust the swing path. Wild. But it worked today.

[Tim Kim @TimKimHQ]

The software product I'm working on has a couple of different miracles baked in, but one miracle that I'm so excited to share with other business owners and operators is how we make delegating truly an operational moment.

It's funny to me how no one in Silicon Valley is talking about this. Delegation is a massive problem, but it's not treated seriously enough by technologists. The problem with delegation is thrown to the side, and everyone acts like the struggling operator just needs to hire a management coach and improve their personal habits. The problem of delegation is dismissed and generates almost zero chatter which is a shame because it is where so much leverage can be found in my experience.

Surprisingly, the software we use to run businesses is, in large part, the reason for this problem.

What I mean by this is that traditional software doesn't truly allow you to capture the steps in a business process . Thankfully, our product takes vague and soft processes and truly externalizes them into a very concrete, observable form. We place a first and last name on who is responsible. Users of our products will find that it is so much easier to delegate.

Interestingly, we can generate trends and insights on how much delegation has happened in a given quarter and whether a given individual is successfully scaling and passing work on to their team as the company grows.

[Tim Kim @TimKimHQ]

The discontent elite aspirants dream about IPO when really they should be dreaming about delighting users. They dream about riches when really they can simply notice suffering and entropy around them, fix the problem, and experience creative bliss.

[Tim Kim @TimKimHQ]

https://t.co/QljiSvQik4

[Tim Kim @TimKimHQ]

Love this. It's also interesting to examine why exactly this is so stimulating. Bear with me here. Interesting stories are stories that take the universal and make them particular. The more particular and novel, while still being universal, the more interesting. Here we take a "universal" foundation story of America and we render it in a more particular format. That is why it is interesting.

You can imagine spinning additional variations by reimagining America's founding within the space age, year 3000. You can also spin the clock backward. Try to reimagine using more prehistoric tools. Through all these iterations, you still have this universal story of a couple humans getting together and realizing that there is a better way to organize one's politics, a better way to manage resources, and a better way to harness the human spirit.

[Sundar Pichai @sundarpichai]

Love this re-imagining of America’s founding using Docs, Gmail, Calendar and more from @GoogleWorkspace. Really puts the history in version history :)

[Tim Kim @TimKimHQ]

I wrote last weekend on the pain beneath the scroll, and learning how to go to bed on time. While putting the charger in the bathroom was helpful, yesterday was my first day actually putting the charger in the garage outside of the house.

This is because despite relocating the charger into my bathroom, I was still captured by my newsfeed on two of five nights. So I decided to take more dramatic action and create a more obvious threshold across which I immediately began to cycle down from the day. I'm really drawing on the economist Richard Thaler's concept of choice architecture as made popular in his book Nudge.

I will report back if this works. Perhaps in 2070, our kids will marvel that we kept phones in the house next to our bedside and had no concept of ''tech hygiene". Newsfeeds are engineered to be addictive. Leaving phones inside the house is almost like leaving whiskey bedside while trying to stay sober, or like going to bed without brushing your teeth. Long term health implications are real.

I spent my 20s working 60-80 hours a week while sleeping 6 hours on average. I simply can't do that anymore. These changes are an attempt to maintain a schedule where I can build 60-70 hours a week, while still sleeping 8 hours a night. Which I know for sure makes me nicer to loved ones and more effective in my endeavors.

[Tim Kim @TimKimHQ]

There are two competing narratives with respect to anger. One narrative argues that, to be a man, is to feel his anger and communicate his anger. Men do not get stomped on. Men do not allow others to hurt them.

The other competing story around manhood and anger is that, to be a man, is to observe, to notice the anger, to not respond, to wait, to address their pain and need first, and then correct the wrong committed. Others first, then self.

I suspect there is a deep truth here, meaning these two opposite stories are both equally true. Whenever we are in the realm of deep truths, the needed concept, of course, is wisdom, and wisdom consisting of knowing which story to apply in which situation.

[Tim Kim @TimKimHQ]

I'm 30 years old, and it was pointed out to me that anger is quite a physical phenomenon. Anger is protective, and it indicates some very real conflict, but almost always the way we express anger is destructive. By appreciating how physical anger is as a phenomenon, it then makes sense that the solution must also be physical. Push-ups were suggested, as well as a very long or hard run. I suppose the fact that this is a novel idea to me suggests that I do in fact struggle with anger management. Oops. I will run some experiments on my anger and get back to you all.

[Tim Kim @TimKimHQ]

The first step of unleashing productivity within the standard white-collar office is to create a massive list of verbs in a structured manner. You need to break things down into their smallest piece. Once an entire office is running all their operations through the structured list of verbs, they are ready for automation. You now have a training data set. This is an obvious, non-obvious point: so many technologists, but not enough practitioners that actually spend 60 hours a week the last 10 years scaling up office operations.

A generalized chat interface is wrong. You need a massive list of verbs within which you can create some sort of chat functionality. The trick is to have a massive list of verbs, aka a massive list of specific chats.

[Tim Kim @TimKimHQ]

A phone charger in the bathroom, so that you can leave your phone in the bathroom before heading into the bedroom every night is truly a life-changing hack. Make sure to stack this habit with your evening shower for optimum habit absorption. The only problem is now you have to face yourself once you get to your bedroom every night. Oops.